I had a chat with an old friend last night about a bevy of CS things and we came to why I haven’t programmed much the past decade or so. It’s not that I can’t. I had to for one of my Ph.D. courses. It’s just that I find it too low bandwidth. It’s a general problem I have. I find many things too low bandwidth. That includes pursuing a Ph.D. wherein they want you to know all kinds of minutae while I would prefer to just ask someone else to do that work for me. Why do I need to know about probability? I’ll just hire someone to do that for me. It’s obviously my entrpreneurial streak, but really, why would anyone want to know everything? Seems like a pointless effort/exercise.
And thus my take on programming, and my missive from yesterday. Most programming languages are way too verbose. And being someone who likes high bandwidth tasks it’s been easier for me the past 20 years to get someone else to code while I just orchestrate what needs doing. Over time I’ve simply left coding behind as its too low bandwidth requiring too much time for what I perceive as viable outputs.
I’m hoping that languages like Python and Clojure will actually help me. Not to become a programmer again, but in getting more done faster with the resources at my disposal. If Clojure and Python are 10x more dense, then that means I can build solutions to client problems substantially faster! And as an entrepreneur, I can build it faster, still charge good amounts for the solutions, and leverage the newly made-available time to build new solutions for new customers. Win-win!
It’s why I remain perplexed why so few companies opt for the denser languages. You can use either fewer developers or do the project in less time allowing one to spend more time bringing in more business. Seems like the logical thing to do to me. Yet, most seem hell-bent on using languages like C++, C#, and Java all of which are verbose and require way too much typing. Maybe it’s the “you can always find a C++/C#/Java programmer” argument. To me that’s silly. A good developer should be able to learn any language and should be happy they’d see results quicker in a new language than an old one. The crappy developers, well, there’s no hope for them anyway.
So, I still hate programming but have hope that the new languages like Ruby, Python, Clojure, Scala and others will finally bring enough density to the code that we can have our staff code less, get the same or better results, all the while bringing in new business. It’s much like what Paul Graham was on about re: Lisp and his company which you can read about at his blog. Head over there to read some interesting history on how he leveraged density to make a successful business, and ultimately a lucrative sale.